With a slate of really, really bad football on Saturday, perhaps the biggest upset of the day came on the set of College Gameday, set this week on the historic grounds of Harvard University for “The Game”, Harvard vs. Yale.
This was the second time that College Gameday has visited an Ivy League location, the last being Penn in 2002, and on a day that only featured only three matchups between ranked teams (two in the Pac-12, one in the Big Ten) and where 5 SEC teams faced FCS opponents, the Ivy League relatively dominated GameDay’s coverage:
Ivy League – 32:48
SEC – 18:07
Pac-12 – 13:26
ACC – 12:15
Big Ten – 9:31
Big 12 – 0:35
Independents – 5:00
FCS (outside of Ivy League) – 3:40
The increase in time spent on the Ivy League goes beyond anything else we’ve seen this season. The 32 minutes plus spent on the league surpasses the homefield time advantage of even the SEC, who has seen an average of 30 more minutes of coverage from a home site. The Big Ten and Big 12 only saw increases of about 5 minutes.
For the Power 5 conferences, the SEC–with said FCS-laden schedule–still received considerably more coverage than the other conferences, and even if you discount the roughly 5 minutes of mocking coverage given to the SEC because of their “Cupcake Saturday”, the SEC received almost equal coverage with the Pac-12, who played host to 2/3rds of the ranked matchups on Saturday. Lame Duck Head Coach Will Muschamp received, for the second time this season, the longest single segment on College Gameday.
This week’s allotment to the Ivy League brought the Non-Power 5 more in line with Power 5 conferences for the season (even moving ahead of the Big 12), except one:
The SEC still well outpaces the field, and for the next closest conference to pull even before the end of the regular season, it would need to receive at least 90 more minutes of airtime than the SEC this weekend. The “homefield advantage” afforded to the host conference makes it virtually impossible that any other conference will come within striking distance as Gameday has already announced that it will, for the 6th time this season, visit an SEC location.
For the second time in three weeks GameDay will visit Tuscaloosa, Alabama–this time for the Iron Bowl. This is the first time in ESPN College Gameday history the show will visit locations in the same conference six times in a single regular season.
